Louis Braun

On 22 June 1476 the Swiss Confederates routed the army of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, outside the small town of Murten. In 1893 a Zurich panorama company hired Louis Braun to paint that battle, and he finished it within a year. The result is a circular canvas about 100 metres long and 10 metres high, made to surround visitors standing at the centre of a rotunda.

Braun had a string of battle panoramas behind him by then. Born in Schwäbisch Hall, in Württemberg, in 1836, he trained in Munich and Paris and first saw war as an artist, following the Austrian army in the Danish War of 1864 and the German armies in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871. Those campaigns fed his most successful panorama, The Battle of Sedan, and others followed on Mars-la-Tour and Lützen. In 1902 he took up a professorship at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

The Murten canvas outlived its genre. Rolled up for most of the 20th century, it went back on show in 2002, at Expo.02, the Swiss national exhibition, inside a metal cube designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and set in Lake Murten. Its three rolls weigh about 1.5 tonnes, and the EPFL, the federal technical university in Lausanne, has since restored and digitised the whole painting.